1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for licensing to use software products, and more specifically, to a system for licensing to use software products which are encrypted and packed in a single storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today's high-capacity storage media such as CD-ROM and MO (Magneto-Optical) disk allow software vendors to provide end-users with many software products packed into a single disk. The software vendors encrypt those software products with qualified encryption keys before writing them into the disk. Although the end-users can get such a disk easily, they are not immediately allowed to use the software products because they are still encrypted. The end-users are required to choose their preferable software products among those in the disk and purchase them, and in exchange for the payment, they receive some keys to decrypt the purchased software products and make them usable. Namely, the end-users are now licensed to use the software products.
The above-described sales system will be more specifically described as follows with reference to FIG. 14 which shows a conventional system for licensing to use software products.
In FIG. 14, a software vendor 410 is defined as a prime wholesaler which solely distributes the software products. This software vendor (wholesaler #0) 410 packs a plurality of encrypted software products into CD-ROMs 411 and supplies them to a wholesaler #1 420 as indicated by [1]. This wholesaler #1 420 is one of the wholesalers which deal with the software vendor 410.
The wholesaler #1 420 distributes the CD-ROMs 411 to some retailers which are among the downstream shops organized by the wholesaler #1 420. A retailer 430, one of such retailers, is supplied with the CD-ROMs 411 as indicated by [2].
An end-user 440 gets one of such CD-ROMs 411 from the retailer 430 as shown as [3] and picks up some software products of her or his choice, which are still encrypted.
The end-user 440 then calls a decryption key provider 450 as indicated by [4] and orders the desired products to them. The decryption key provider 450 provides the end-user 440 with the decryption keys [5] in exchange for the payment. Now the end-user 440 can extract the purchased software products from the CD-ROM 411 by using the decryption keys and convert them to executable programs.
The decryption key provider 450 distributes the profits to the retailer 430 and the wholesaler #1 420 and also pays to the software vendor (prime wholesaler #0) 410 as arrows [6] show.
Such a conventional sales system, however, has the following problems.
(1) The retailers are unable to know promptly what software products were sold to the end-users, since the end-users directly contact the decryption key provider and get the keys from them in exchange for the payment. PA0 (2) The retailers are not allowed to set retail prices for the products based on their own pricing strategy. PA0 (3) In order to share the profits, it is necessary to trace what sales channels were actually used in each trade. Inaccuracies of such information could cause a trouble with the profit distribution. PA0 (4) The decryption key provider will grasp all the business information related to the shops and end-users.